May 14th, 2007
BlackBerry CEO: here's why there won't be any more major outages
In an interview with eWeek, Research In Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie (that's him) says the BlackBerry blackout of last month has been "unambigiously solved" and what's more, won't hapen again.
eWeek's Wayne Rash noted "that the improbable combination of events, which included the failure of a minor software upgrade to a caching subsystem, the failure of the failover system and the subsequent overloading of a second system has been fixed."
"It was a process error that we had that's been fixed. It shouldn't have happened, and it won't happen again," Balsillie told Wayne.. "It wasn't a corruption of any form of the infrastructure, and that's very important."
And now for Jim's line-in-the-sand promise:
"We're clearly putting a lot more fault tolerance into the system, a lot more capacity. We're having domain failover architectures; we're having business continuity solutions experts, so from that component piece of the infrastructure, that's not going to happen again."
To underscore that resolve, Jim then went into a major articulation of the Blackberry maker's dedication to fault tolerance.
"Explaining that the problem that caused the blackout was totally avoidable, Balsillie said that the company is broadening, strengthening and 'fault tolerating' " the system, Wayne writes. " 'It's a global and public safety imperative,'" he said, adding that there is no constraint on budget or resources for this work."
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
